Whispers of the Flesh (24 page)

“A
gifted
baby,” Lili added.

“Um, yeah, well, when I said your timing was bad, I didn’t really mean . . . Well, it’s not about my cycle. This just isn’t the right time. Tell you what. If I reach the point where I’m, like, staring menopause in the face and I still haven’t managed to get one in the oven, I’ll take you up on the offer.”

“A rain check,” Elic said. “You got it.”

As he and Lili were walking back down the hall after taking their leave of Isabel, Elic said, “Do you think Emmett knows?”

Shaking her head, Lili said, “Not from the way he was talking about Madeleine at lunch today. He was talking about that weekend in ’seventy-two when she came here with those friends of hers—you remember.”

Elic smiled. “Inigo’s bed. We painted that guitar on you, and there were a couple of art students, that little ballerina . . . Oh, and Hitch. Of course I remember.”

“Well, apparently Madeleine and Emmett started seeing each other right after they got back to London, and Isabel was born nine months later. He called Madeleine a ‘free spirit,’ implying that they started sleeping together pretty much immediately. Two months later, she told him she was pregnant and they were married.”

“Except the baby wasn’t his. Do you suppose she ever told him the truth?” Elic asked.

“It didn’t sound that way. She wouldn’t be the only woman who ever pulled that one on an unsuspecting, besotted boyfriend.”

“Thank God I’m not human. Way too much melodrama and not enough screwing. Speaking of which . . .” Elic cupped his aching balls with an expression of mock agony.

“On to Plan B,” Lili said.

“Okay, Elic, let me get this straight,” said Grace Garvey, sitting up in bed in a white “wifebeater” tank, her stubby little bleached dreadlocks pulled back by a stretchy headband. “You’re offering to impregnate me with blond, blue-eyed, smart-ass DNA to match Laura’s so that we can have the half Barbadian, half Aryan, café au lait lambkin of our dreams and live happily ever after.”

“Well, green-eyed,” said Elic, picturing Jason.

“But you have blue eyes,” Grace said.

“I keep telling him they’re blue.” Lili, sitting next to Elic at the foot of Grace’s bed, shot him a look. “He keeps insisting they’re sea green.”

“I don’t see a turkey baster sticking out of the pocket of that robe,” Grace told Elic.

“Ah. Yes, well . . . I’m afraid it won’t really work that way.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“I can’t, you know”—he gestured vaguely in the area of his crotch—“in an inanimate object.”

In response to Grace’s skeptically cocked eyebrow, Lili said, “No, it’s true. He can’t even come from oral sex, or if I . . .” She stroked her fist back and forth. “He’s all about the vagina.”

Not that he’d go the turkey baster route even if he could. Grace’s scrubbed-clean, just-awakened face had the quirky prettiness of a couture fashion model. She had just the right amount of muscle shaping her arms, and perfect little breasts that he couldn’t wait to taste.

Grace nodded to Lili. “And
you’re
here because . . . ?”

“Oh. Well . . . We thought perhaps because you’re, you know, not really that into men . . .”

With a little laugh, Grace said, “
There’s
an understatement. You thought I’d be more into it with you here to, er . . . rev up the old libido, eh?”

Lili gave Grace her most deliciously seductive smile. “Something like that.”

Grace, although a prime
arkhutu
—smart, beautiful, and maternal—wasn’t remotely the sure thing, in terms of seduction, that Jason had been. In cases where a human’s cooperation in the
transfert de sperme
wasn’t a given, Elic would usually resort to his
liggia spiall
—unless the use of enchantment was likely to create more problems than it solved. In Grace’s case, she would be utterly flummoxed upon finding herself pregnant, given that she didn’t even sleep with men. Far from being thrilled, she might conclude, based upon her “dream” of having had sex with Elic, that she’d been the victim of a date rape drug, in which case she was likely to terminate the pregnancy. She might even report the incident to the authorities, which could be disastrous for him. That left seduction as Elic’s only practical option, with Lili there to sweeten the deal, as it were.

“I thought you two were an item,” Grace said.

“We’re not exclusive,” Lili responded.

“And you’re what—bi?”

“More or less.” Actually, discounting Elle, Lili wasn’t that interested in making love to other women—unless she knew it would excite Elic or her
gabru
du jour, in which case she approached it with cheerful enthusiasm. Elic, when he was Elle, found both men and women intensely arousing. In his primary male persona, it was strictly women, since that was the only way he could climax. Inigo preferred women, “but my cock isn’t always so particular,” and Darius would absorb the desires of any human who touched him.

“Yeah, well, not only is this whole thing just a wee bit mad,” Grace said, “I’m afraid it’s the wrong time of the month for me to conceive. I won’t be ovulating till . . .” She did some swift fingertip calculating. “. . . the twenty-second at the earliest.”

“That’s five days from now,” Lili said. “Sperm can stay alive that long.”

Grace said, “Yeah, but the longer the interval between sex and ovulation, the less likely it is that any sperm will actually fertilize the egg.”

Elic groaned inwardly. He had to pick a
nurse
.

Lili said, “From what you were telling us at lunch today about how hard it is to find a man who’s interested in fathering a child—the right kind of man, anyway—I should think you’d want to take Elic up on his offer and see what happens.”

Grace cast him a speculative look.

“Have you ever made love to a man?” he asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said, “when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize the reason I liked girls was ’cause I liked girls. Last time was a good fifteen years ago.”

“So it’s almost like you’re a virgin,”Lili said. “Elic is wonderful with virgins.”

“I promise it will be good for you,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to be good,”she said. “All I care about is getting your little swimmers where they belong.”

“So, you’ll do it?” Lili said.

“With
him,
” Grace said. “You’ve got to go.”

“Oh.”

“It’s Laura,” Grace explained. “If I come home and tell her I bonked a tall, blond Viking in the hopes of having a baby with some resemblance to her, well, it might give her pause, but she’ll be okay with it—more than okay if I actually end up pregnant. But if I tell her you were there, keeping the furnace stoked . . .” She appraised Lili with a wistfully lustful expression. “Well, that would be cheating with another woman, and we don’t do that. And we don’t lie to each other, either, so I’m afraid it’s not to be, but don’t think I don’t appreciate the offer.”

After Lili had kissed Elic goodbye and left, he rose and said, “Would you like me to turn off the light?”

“Yes. No.” She thought about it, holding the blanket in front of her chest. “Yes.”

He turned it off, slipped his robe to the floor, and climbed under the covers. Without touching her yet, so as to let her get used to his presence next to her, he said, “I know you don’t care about it being good for you—you probably don’t even want it to be good for you—but with your knowledge of reproductive physiology, I’m sure you’re aware that conception is more likely if the woman climaxes at about the same time as the man.”

Her response was a long sigh.

“And of course,” he continued, lightly stroking her arm, “it will facilitate penetration if you’re wet.”

He heard her swallow.

He let his hand graze the side of her breast through her tank top. She drew in a breath, but didn’t move away from him.

“You won’t be sorry,” he murmured as he caressed her breast, lightly thumbing the nipple.

Through a low chuckle as she turned toward him, she said, “I’m beginning to get that idea.”

Eight

I
S IT TRUE you can deep throat a guy, like in the movie? Doobie told me you—
Oh.
Oh, God. Oh, my God, Lili. Fuck, yeah. Take it all. Suck it deep . . .” It was a guttural whisper from somewhere in the heaps of bodies surrounding me, maybe twenty, thirty feet away, but I heard it like it was breathed right into my ear.

About an hour had passed since Madeleine got pissed and cut out. Having tired of the bonfire, most of the Gangsters had retreated into the bathhouse, where they lit candles and sticks of incense, Pieter playing a guitar and Diane a recorder while the others lay around on pillows toking up and drinking and getting frisky.

I still sat slumped against the rock wall, smoking cigarettes and tapping the ashes into my empty beer bottle as I waited for Emmett to come back. I didn’t talk to anybody, just sat there taking in the scene, watching the candles glint like stars amid a dark, slowly roiling kaleidoscope of batik and tie-dye, hair and arms and legs . . .

Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .

It felt almost as if time itself had been dialed down to a slower speed. Every time I raised or lowered my cigarette, the red-hot tip drew a line of fluorescence that hovered in the darkness for a second before fading away. I wasn’t remotely drunk; I’d had, like, two beers in as many hours. I started wondering if maybe I was getting off on all the pot smoke in the air, ’cause my thoughts were getting pretty damn slippery, except I’d smoked pot a couple of times, and it didn’t feel anything like this.

I decided it had just been a long, strange day at the tail end of a long, strange weekend. I was tired and bored, but too paralyzed by ennui to get up and make my way out of here and back to the château. The way I was feeling, I’d just end up tripping over everybody, anyway.

As summer evenings go, it was fairly cool, which may have been why there was just one couple in the pool, Elic and a voluptuous chick wearing a leather thong as a headband. She appeared to be sitting on the submerged bench. He was kneeling between her legs, the two of them holding each other close, hardly moving. She had on a white bikini, or at least the top of it, so I wouldn’t have known what was going on if I hadn’t heard her whispering, in a shuddery pre-orgasmic way, “That’s it . . . that’s it. Keep it slow, just like that. Grind against my clit. Yeah . . . oh, yeah, oh God . . .”

Her whisper was just one of many reverberating off the marble walls, filling my skull with a hubbub of conversations and low moans, the sucking of joints and cigarettes and cocks, the fleshy kiss of lips, skin rubbing against skin, grunts, endearments, entreaties . . .

“Slow down. Let’s come at the same time.” It was the whispered, breathless voice of Inigo, who’d been messing around with a pretty little thing named Maria. “All three of us.”

I took a closer look and saw that someone else had, indeed, joined them under their ubiquitous Indian throw. It was dark even with the candles, but I recognized the third person by his superblack hair and his height as Prince Valiant. The three of them lay snugged up together on their sides, moving to the same laid-back cadence. With two guys and a girl, you’d expect the girl to be the meat of the sandwich, but it was Inigo in the middle, screwing Maria face-to-face with Val tucked up behind him.

No fucking way,
I thought, but through the thin throw, I could see Val’s ass pumping in a slow, undeniably carnal rhythm as he reached around Inigo to squeeze and caress Maria’s ass. “So, are ye bisexual, then?” he asked Inigo in a husky, slightly strained brogue.

Inigo shook his head. “Hedonist. I like girls, but man, I gotta tell you, having a big, thick cock inside you when you’ve got your own big, thick cock inside a nice tight, sweet pussy . . . I’m telling you, it doesn’t get much better.”

All righty, then.
I lifted the beer bottle to my mouth, forgetting that it was empty but for ashes and butts, and
Whoooaaa . . .
When I lowered it, I wasn’t just seeing double, but triple, quadruple, quintuple, and on and on, a whole water-fall of shimmery green bottles.

What the fuck?

Okay, so it wasn’t the beer and it wasn’t a contact high. I’d smoked opium in ’Nam once, and it wasn’t like that, either. No mellowness, no somnolent bliss. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was starting to feel seriously fucked up.

So, if it wasn’t a drug . . .

“Hitch, did you hear me?” a woman said softly.

I looked and saw Jo, my eager-beaver playmate from that afternoon’s body-painting session, cuddling under an afghan nearby with Willow. Only, they were doing more than cuddling, as I discovered when Jo lifted the afghan and said, “Join us.”

Jo had her Wimbledon College T-shirt tugged up above her breasts, her fatigue pants bunched around one ankle. Willow still had on the see-through peasant blouse she’d been wearing when Bernie read her chakras earlier, but she was naked from the waist down. The two girls were locked together with their legs entwined, rubbing their pussies together.

“We need a nice, hard cock to play with,” whispered Willow as she thrust her hips, leaving ghostly shadows.

Oh, shit.

“Please, Hitch?” Jo implored, eyeing me seductively as she plucked one of her friend’s hard little nipples through the diaphanous blouse. “I won’t be bossy, I promise. We’re both so wet already, you won’t have to do anything but put it in us—first one, then the other. We’ll come in seconds, I guarantee you.”

“And then give you a nice long massage,” Willow purred, “your back and then your front—a very thorough massage. We’ll use our tongues.”

“We’ll lick you slowly and softly,” Jo said, “no sucking, no matter how hard you beg us, just licking, till you’re so crazy from it that you just grab one of us and shove it in our mouth and spew like a fucking geyser.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

This was every man’s dream, two scorching blondes begging for it, talking dirty, raring to go, and there I sat with my limp dick and my galloping dementia, and they were staring at me, their smiles turning perplexed, disappointed.

“Something wrong?” Jo asked.

Only that I was a fucking eunuch in the middle of a nervous breakdown, trying to figure out how to turn down two sex bombs who wanted to fuck and suck my brains out.

Jo and Willow looked at each other.

“You stoned?” Willow asked.

If only.
I shook my head before realizing that would have been the perfect excuse, being too stoned to function, if only I’d had the presence of mind to grab at it. “Um . . .”

I lifted my beer bottle to buy a few seconds, groaned at the cascade of iridescent green afterimages, and put it down, and one of the girls whispered,“Fucked up,”and the other one said, “I didn’t see him smoke anything,” and I thought,
They know.
They know I’m not just stoned or drunk, they know I’m fucked in the head.

Tap tap tap . . .

They know. They all knew, not just the girls, ’cause they weren’t the only ones staring now. They all saw me there, cowering against the wall, afraid to get up and pick my way through this minefield of writhing, glowing bodies to get out of here, ’cause I didn’t think I could manage that, not in the state of mind I was, not with all their grinning faces looking at me like they knew I was crazy, but they had
no idea
how fucking crazy I really was.

“. . . scorched . . .”

“. . . Vietnam. That’s how they get.”

All the whispers, no matter how far away, I heard them all, an atonal chorus of hisses and snickers and mutters, and of course the tapping, growing louder and louder . . .

Tap tap tap tap tap . . .

It was like being back in that fucking black box, crouching there in the dark with my fists pressed to my ears, trying desperately to block it all out.

Just breathe,
I told myself.
Don’t think, just breathe.

“There it is! Catch it!”

Four guys ran into the bathhouse amid screams and shrieks of laughter, stumbling over the people lying there, leaving jerky streams of afterimages in their wake, chasing a cat, that gray cat from before, as it darted this way and that, skirting bodies.

“I got it!” someone yelled. “Wait. What the fuck?”

“Where is it? Where’d it go?”

“Hey, check it out, it’s John Wayne Hitchens.” It was Bernie, gesturing toward me with his beer bottle.

Shit.
Driven by primal instinct, I rose to my feet without even thinking about it, ’cause thinking wasn’t exactly on the agenda, and stepped in front of the cave entrance so there wasn’t a wall at my back. My arms were at my sides, hands ready, brain not remotely ready, short-circuited wires in there, twitching and crackling.

Not a good time for this. Not a good fucking time at all.

“Having a good time?” Bernie asked, fixing those sly eyes on me as he took a slug out of his beer bottle. “Having a good fucking time, are we? You look a bit peaked, actually. Doesn’t he look peaked?”

His friends agreed that I looked peaked.

I knew I should say something so I didn’t look like some kind of zombie just standing there staring at them.

“Cat got your tongue?” Bernie asked. “What are you staring at? You look like a fucking zombie.”

“What?” I said.

“I said you look like a zombie.”

“But I was just thinking that.”

Bernie and his friends erupted in laughter, weird hysterical laughter, their lips drawn back to show their teeth, barking like hyenas in the night, toying with their prey.

“Keep on truckin’ there, Hitchens,” said Bernie as he turned and led his slobbering pack out of the bathhouse.

“Happy trails,” one of them called out, and they screamed with laughter as the night swallowed them up.

I was standing now. That was something. But the prospect of negotiating my way to the door of the bathhouse through all those bodies, all those eyes now staring directly at me . . .

Not my imagination. They were really staring, just staring like I was something in a zoo.

“You all right, man?” The voice sounded funny. An accent. Pieter.

Man?
I sure as hell didn’t feel like much of a man, standing there like an idiot in the middle of an orgy, for God’s sake, with no way to take part even if I wanted to, thanks to the extra-special attention my captors had paid to Sparky and the boys during that savage post-escape beating. Clubs, boots, that iron rod . . .

“Hitch?” A woman’s voice. “Are you—”

I turned and bolted into the cave, ducking through the opening and running right into someone who was sitting there. I stumbled and fell, hearing him grunt as I slammed a knee into his chest, me kicking his legs as I went down.

“Sorry,” I said as I sat up on the floor of packed earth. “I didn’t see you . . .”

I still didn’t see him. There was no one there, although I swore I could hear footsteps retreating into the cave.

Oh, shit.
I was gone. I’d completely and totally lost it.